Like those decibel-killing choppers used to transport Seal Team Six to their target, Zero Dark Thirty sneaks up on you. Kathryn Bigelow’s procedural, covering the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, takes slow and meticulous steps, piecing together tangential clues in an exhaustive search that will have you believing there is no end in sight, even though you already know how it ends. As Jessica Chastain’s CIA operative, Maya, closes in on her bounty -- referred to here as UBL -- this intricate thriller tightens its grip and keeps you gasping for air. Landing in a year that has already proved a cut above for movies, Zero Dark Thirty hits its mark, giving the audience exactly what it wants and then daring to ask whether it was worth it.

By opening with devastating sounds from 9/11 (news reports, distress calls), Bigelow’s film reminds us why we set out on this mission to begin with and then cuts to what exactly that entails: a torture scene. A prisoner is beat down, subjected to waterboarding and sleep deprivation. He sh*ts himself in the process and barely has it in him to show humiliation. Even when he’s fed morsels, it’s cruel, giving him hope when we all know he has none. We want him to speak just to get it over with it. Some critics have already charged the film with valorizing torture, which just makes us wonder whether they saw the same movie.

Bigelow and writer Mark Boal hold back on didacticism, presenting such horror as a matter of fact. We wanted retribution for 9/11 and this is how it was achieved. We will never know whether such cruelty was necessary to finding UBL because, as it turns out, this particular torture scene (out of the hundreds that remain off-screen) drops a clue. The name Abu Ahmed is finally mentioned, and Maya clings to it. She pursues, abandons and resurrects that name, which many discount as a phantom. She spends years, dollars and lives chasing a ghost that matters less and less but nevertheless continues to haunt her and America.

That obsessive search in the dark is what consumes both Maya and the film. Boal’s tightly knit screenplay and Bigelow’s precise direction keeps things ticking, as if a bomb is always about to go off. They condense 10 years of moral outrage, political interference, false hopes and lost lives into a brisk nail-biter that takes the opportunity to have the final word on post-9/11 cinema and uses, instead, to pose more questions.

Bigelow once again proves that you don’t need to be a man to make a muscular movie. You don’t even need a male lead, since Jessica Chastain gives one of the ballsiest performances of the year. Tackling a story that could have been all gunplay and hoorah, Bigelow and company approach it with both somber grace and brutal efficiency. The filmmakers know that the bullets speak for themselves, so the filmmakers don’t need to amplify anything, not even during the nerve-racking final raid.

Some have described Zero Dark Thirty as overtly clinical, even cold, since characters don’t share their personal lives, and Bigelow and Boal, in their matter-of-fact presentation, don’t make heavy-handed attempts to elicit emotions or a victory dance. The writer/director team doesn’t need to tug at your heartstrings since the story comes loaded with an emotional context that the audience will project regardless (whether it’s hatred or some charitable sympathy).

Whenever disappointment or tragedy strikes, Maya quickly wipes away her tears to focus on the task at hand, and the film goes with her. There’s simply no time to reflect. That may be the bigger tragedy at the heart of this story. Maya’s a character whose emotions and personal life are buried beneath papers and interrogation videos, with only a drawing from a child hidden in the background to suggest that this woman has a family. Certainly, she has her moments when personality is aching to come out.

But to do her job, she must try her best to become inhuman. Torture is just part of the process, and bittersweet victory just gets filed away, until a new mission rears its ugly head.